Kyle MacLachlan

“Long before we moved into the Pacific Northwest, we were playing around with this idea of the plains and a place far away from the world. But what we really lacked was that sense of mystery in the forest and the darkness that moving a little further west had.” —Mark Frost

“The murder of Laura Palmer was the center of the story, the thing around which all the show’s other elements revolved — like a sun in a little solar system. It was not supposed to get solved. The idea was for it to recede a bit into the background, and the foreground would be that week’s show. But the mystery of the death of Laura Palmer would stay alive.” —David Lynch

3. Before Twin Peaks, co-creators Mark Frost and David Lynch teamed up to write a Marilyn Monroe biopic, titled Goddess, which was never produced.

They even worked their failed venture into Agent Cooper’s monologue in the series premiere: “There are two things that continue to trouble me, and I’m speaking now not only as an agent of the bureau but also as a human being. What really went on between Marilyn Monroe and the Kennedys, and who really pulled the trigger on JFK.”

“I’m not supposed to say it. But David knows I tell what happens, and what happened was that Lara [Flynn Boyle] was dating Kyle [MacLachlan], and she was mad that my character was getting more attention, so then Kyle started saying that his character shouldn’t be with my character because it doesn’t look good, ’cause I’m too young. Literally, because of that, they brought in Heather Graham — who’s younger than I am — for him and Billy Zane for me. I was not happy about it. It was stupid.” —Sherilyn Fenn

According to the fan site Welcome to Twin Peaks: “It was supposed to be only a fraction of that, but afraid its viewers wouldn’t be able to relate to such a small town, ABC demanded Twin Peaks to be more populated. So David Lynch and Mark Frost appended a ‘1’ at the end.”

7. Despite the show’s success, the film Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me was booed at the 1992 Cannes Film Festival, and bombed at the U.S. box office.

“The movie is a true folly—almost nothing in it adds up—yet it isn’t jokey and smug like Lynch’s last film, Wild at Heart, or his recent TV series, the gruesomely wacked-out On the Air, which seemed to pick up where the disastrous second half of Twin Peaks left off. In Fire Walk With Me, he’s at least trying to recover his poetic sincerity. There have always been two sides to Lynch: the inscrutable, demonic prankster and the rhapsodic dreamer. If only his dreams weren’t starting to look like reruns.” —Owen Gleiberman, EW

8. At one point, Mikhail Gorbachev persuaded George H.W. Bush to help him unearth who killed Laura Palmer:

Gorbachev made HW Bush try and get Lynch to admit who killed Laura Palmer

— JahHills (@Ryan Hamilton Walsh)

9. Steven Spielberg was attached to direct the second season premiere, but Lynch insisted on directing the episode himself.

“Because we were friendly we talked about it a lot and he said to me in passing how fun it would be to direct an episode so I went to Mark over the summer and said, ‘This probably is not a bad way to kick off the second season, right?’ So we sat down with him and had this very long meeting about the second season and Steven just said ‘I want it to be as weird as possible, it’ll be so much fun’ so whether or not he would have even done it – we’ll never really know, but when Mark told David he didn’t even hesitate saying, ‘No, no, I think I’ll direct the first one. Maybe he can direct later in the season’ – which he obviously didn’t.” —Twin Peaks producer Harley Peyton

10. It only took 20 minutes for David Lynch and composer Angelo Badalamenti to come up with the theme song.

Alberto E. Rodriguez / Getty Images

ABC

“The Love Theme, which is heard repeatedly throughout the series, is a short, twisted piece of music, lasting about three minutes. But the sheer speed and ease of its composition indicate what a happy collaboration Badalamenti and Lynch share.” —Ron Givens, EW

11. The bizarre vocal patterns in the Red Room were achieved by having the actors read their lines in reverse.